I dont know if its in the works already, but since we have a cool toon shader, would it be feasable to be able to get a better edge draw in Blender? Also with different stroke brushes (edge line type).

I would imagine something like maybe a per material basis with edge buttons on/off toggle and/or in render buttons. The current edge draw is okay, but not good enough. Maybe a stroke width definer (weight)?

The per material basis could be a good option because you could have different thickness for a lot of edges in a render. The edge (extra options plus existing ones) draw in render buttons could also be useful as to applying a brush to all the edge strokes in a render pass.

Anyways Im getting too far ahead of myself. Is this idea do-able?
Im not a programmer so i dont know. But I do know Blender needs a better edge drawer. I realise this may not be top priority stuff, but has anyone thought about it?

Gee, cessen, I'd say your ability to write shaders is much greater than your ability to recognize coolness. Of course, no matter how cool the tool, the talent comes from the artist.

At SIGGRAPH last year, someone presented a paper on producing 'sketchy' renderings. The output had a very nice hand drawn cartoon look to it.

Their approach basically was to render a depth map of the model ( aka the z-buffer ) and then run a standard image processing edge detection kernel over it. This gave nice fat lines for the edges of objects and lighter, thinner lines for the 'creases'. The output of the edge detector was then composited over the flat shaded image to show off the edges.

I don't know if this thread is stale, but I may as well post just for newbies browsing...

Over at the Elysiun.com forums, a project called "SLiM" has been posted. It creates the affect you seem to want, and is a Python script, which may be a positive or a negative for you It currently animation in Alpha 3B.

Thx for that link but that script is python and works though not that well.

It's a neat thing but wholly impractical.

I was just in the elysiun.com forums and more and more people are using the toon shader. And cessen... it is cool and toon shading doesn't need to be complex, I even completely switch off the spec for "realistic" toon feel.

It does seem like it's time for more edge fucntionality. I had a look at the source code and can't make heads or tales of it. But then I have like zero experience in C++... I just know a little php... But the fact that I actually downloaded the source and had a looksee myself shows you how important I think this neglected function is.

Of course I'm interested in it only now cause I am working with it myself. But it really does need some improving. It has a few more functions for the unified renderer, but appears rather unstable when used.